When copyright infringement lawsuits hit the US courts, there’s often a serious case at hand. Whether that’s the sharing of a leaked movie online or indeed the mass infringement that allegedly took place on Megaupload, there’s usually something quite meaty to discuss.

A lawsuit filed this week in a Pennsylvania federal court certainly provides the later, but without managing to be much more than a fairly trivial matter in the first instance.

The case was filed by sports psychologist and author Dr. Keith Bell. It begins by describing Bell as an “internationally recognized performance consultant” who has worked with 500 teams, including the Olympic and national teams for the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Fiji, and the Cayman Islands.

Bell is further described as a successful speaker, athlete and coach; “A four-time
collegiate All-American swimmer, a holder of numerous world and national masters swim records, and has coached several collegiate, high school, and private swim teams to competitive success.”

At the heart of the lawsuit is a book that Bell published in 1982, entitled Winning Isn’t Normal.

“The book has enjoyed substantial acclaim, distribution and publicity. Dr. Bell is the sole author of this work, and continues to own all rights in the work,” the lawsuit (pdf) reads.

Bell claims that on or about November 6, 2015, King’s College head football coach Jeffery Knarr retweeted a tweet that was initially posted from @NSUBaseball32, a Twitter account operated by Northeastern State University’s RiverHawks baseball team. The retweet, as shown in the lawsuit, can be seen below.

The retweet that sparked the lawsuit

“The post was made without authorization from Dr. Bell and without attribution
to Dr. Bell,” the lawsuit reads.

“Neither Defendant King’s College nor Defendant Jeffery Knarr contacted Dr.
Bell to request permission to use Dr. Bell’s copyrighted work. As of November 14, 2015, the post had received 206 ‘Retweets’ and 189 ‘Likes.’ Due to the globally accessible nature of Twitter, the post was accessible by Internet users across the world.”

Bell says he sent a cease and desist letter to NSU in September 2016 and shortly thereafter NSU removed the post, which removed the retweets. However, this meant that Knarr’s retweet had been online for “at least” 10 months and 21 days.

To put the icing on the cake, Bell also holds the trademark to the phrase “Winning Isn’t Normal”, so he’s suing Knarr and his King’s College employer for trademark infringement too.

“The Defendants included Plaintiff’s trademark twice in the Twitter post. The first instance was as the title of the post, with the mark shown in letters which
were emphasized by being capitalized, bold, and underlined,” the lawsuit notes.

“The second instance was at the end of the post, with the mark shown in letters which were emphasized by being capitalized, bold, underlined, and followed by three
exclamation points.”

Describing what appears to be a casual retweet as “willful, intentional and purposeful” infringement carried out “in disregard of and with indifference to Plaintiff’s rights,” Bell demands damages and attorneys fees from Knarr and his employer.

“As a direct and proximate result of said infringement by Defendants, Plaintiff is
entitled to damages in an amount to be proven at trial,” the lawsuit concludes.

Since the page from the book retweeted by Knarr is a small portion of the overall work, there may be a fair use defense. Nevertheless, defending this kind of suit is never cheap, so it’s probably fair to say there will already be a considerable amount of regret among the defendants at ever having set eyes on Bell’s 35-year-old book.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

ABS-CBN, the largest media and entertainment company in the Philippines, has delivered another strike to pirate sites in the United States.

Last week a federal court in Florida signed a default judgment against 43 websites that offered copyright-infringing streams of ABS-CBN owned movies, including Star Cinema titles.

The order was signed exactly one day after the complaint was filed, in what appears to be a streamlined process.

The media company accused the websites of trademark and copyright infringement by making free streams of its content available without permission. It then asked the court for assistance to shut these sites down as soon as possible.

“Defendants’ websites operating under the Subject Domain Names are classic examples of pirate operations, having no regard whatsoever for the rights of ABS-CBN and willfully infringing ABS-CBN’s intellectual property.

“As a result, ABS-CBN requires this Court’s intervention if any meaningful stop is to be put to Defendants’ piracy,” ABS-CBN wrote.

Instead of a lengthy legal process that can take years to complete, ABS-CBN went for an “ex-parte” request for domain seizures, which means that the websites in question are not notified or involved in the process before the order is issued.

After reviewing the proposed injunction, US District Judge Beth Bloom signed off on it. This means that all the associated registrars must hand over the domain names in question.

“The domain name registrars for the Subject Domain Names shall immediately assist in changing the registrar of record for the Subject Domain Names, to a holding account with a registrar of Plaintiffs’ choosing..,” the order (pdf) reads.

In the days that followed, several streaming-site domains were indeed taken over. Movieonline.io, 1movies.tv, 123movieshd.us, 4k-movie.us, icefilms.ws and others are now linking to a notice page with information about the lawsuit instead.

The notice

Gomovies.es, which is also included, has not been transferred yet, but the operator appears to be aware of the lawsuit as the site now redirects to Gomovies.vg. Other domains, such as Onlinefullmovie.me, Putlockerm.live and Newasiantv.io remain online as well.

While the targeted sites together are good for thousands of daily visitors, they’re certainly not the biggest fish.

That said, the most significant thing about the case is not that these domain names have been taken offline. What stands out is the ability of an ex-parte request from a copyright holder to easily take out dozens of sites in one swoop.

Given ABS-CBN’s legal track record, this is likely not the last effort of this kind. The question now is if others will follow suit.

—

The full list of targeted domain is as follows.

1 movieonline.io
2 1movies.tv
3 gomovies.es
4 123movieshd.us
5 4k-movie.us
6 desitvflix.net
7 globalpinoymovies.com
8 icefilms.ws
9 jhonagemini.com
10 lambinganph.info
11 mrkdrama.com
12 newasiantv.me
13 onlinefullmovie.me
14 pariwiki.net
15 pinoychannel.live
16 pinoychannel.mobi
17 pinoyfullmovies.net
18 pinoyhdtorrent.com
19 pinoylibangandito.pw
20 pinoymoviepedia.ch
21 pinoysharetv.com
22 pinoytambayanhd.com
23 pinoyteleseryerewind.info
24 philnewsnetwork.com
25 pinoytvrewind.info
26 pinoytzater.com
27 subenglike.com
28 tambayantv.org
29 teleseryi.com
30 thepinoy1tv.com
31 thepinoychannel.com
32 tvbwiki.com
33 tvnaa.com
34 urpinoytv.com
35 vikiteleserye.com
36 viralsocialnetwork.com
37 watchpinoymoviesonline.com
38 pinoysteleserye.xyz
39 pinoytambayan.world
40 lambingan.lol
41 123movies.film
42 putlockerm.live
43 yonip.zone
43 yonipzone.rocks

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

For the uninitiated, RPCS3 is an open-source Sony PlayStation 3 emulator for PC. This growing and brilliant piece of code was publicly released in 2012 and since then has been under constant development thanks to a decent-sized team of programmers and other contributors.

While all emulation has its challenges, emulating a relatively recent piece of hardware such as Playstation 3 is a massive undertaking. As a result, RPCS3 needs funding. This it achieves through its Patreon page, which currently receives support from 675 patrons to the tune of $3,000 per month.

There’s little doubt that there are plenty of people out there who want the project to succeed. Yesterday, however, things took a turn for the worse when RPCS3 attracted the negative attention of Atlus, the developer behind the utterly beautiful RPG, Persona 5.

According to the RPCS3 team, Atlus filed a DMCA takedown notice with Patreon requesting the removal of the entire RPCS3 page after the team promoted the fact that Persona 5 would be compatible with the under-development emulator.

“The PS3 emulator itself is not infringing on our copyrights and trademarks; however, no version of the P5 game should be playable on this platform; and [the RPCS3] developers are infringing on our IP by making such games playable,” Atlus told Patreon.

Fortunately for everyone involved, Patreon did not storm in and remove the entire page, not least since the page itself didn’t infringe on Atlus’ IP rights. However, Atlus was not happy with the response and attempted to negotiate with the fund-raising platform, noting that in order for Persona 5 to work, the user would have to circumvent the game’s DRM protections.

The RPCS3 team, on the other hand, believe they’re on solid ground, noting that where their main developers live, it is legal to make personal copies of legally purchased games. They concede it may not be legal for everyone, but in any event, that would be irrelevant to the DMCA notice filed against their Patreon page. Indeed, trying to take down an entire fundraiser with a DMCA notice was a significant overreach under the circumstances

According to a statement from the team, ultimately a decision was taken to proceed with caution. In order to avoid a full takedown of their Patreon page, all mentions of Persona 5 were removed from both the fund-raiser and main RPSC3 site yesterday.

The RPSC3 team noted that they had no idea why Atlus targeted their project but an announcement from the developer later shone a little light on the issue.

“We believe that our fans best experience our titles (like Persona 5) on the actual platforms for which they are developed. We don’t want their first experiences to be framerate drops, or crashes, or other issues that can crop up in emulation that we have not personally overseen,” Atlus explained.

While some gamers expressed negative opinions over Atlus’ undoubtedly overbroad actions yesterday, it’s difficult to argue with the developer’s main point. Emulators can be beautiful things but there is no doubt that in many instances they don’t recreate the gaming experience perfectly. Indeed, in some cases when things don’t go to plan, the results can be pretty horrible.

That being said, for whatever reason Atlus has chosen not to release a PC version of this popular title so, as many hardcore emulator fans will tell you (this one included), that’s a bit of a red rag to a bull. The company suggests that it might remedy that situation in the future though, so maybe that’s some consolation.

In the meantime, there’s a significant backlash against Atlus and what it attempted to do to the RPCS3 project and its fund-raising efforts. Some people are threatening never to buy an Atlus game ever again, for example, and that’s their prerogative.

But really – is anyone truly surprised that Atlus reacted in the way it did?

While Persona 5 isn’t available on PC yet, this isn’t an out-of-print game from 1982 that’s about to disappear into the black hole of time because there’s no hardware to play it on. This is a game created for relatively current hardware (bang up to date if you include the PS4 version) that was released April 2017 in the United States, just a handful of months ago.

As such, none of the usual ‘moral’ motivations for emulating games on other platforms exist for Persona 5 and for that reason alone, the decision to heavily mention it in RPCS3 fund-raising efforts was bound to backfire. It doesn’t matter whether emulation or dumping of ROMs is legal in some regions, any company can be expected to wade in when someone threatens their business model.

The stark reality is that when they do, entire projects can be put at risk. In this case, Patreon stepped in to save the day but it could’ve been a lot worse. Martyring the whole project for one game would’ve been a disaster for the team and the public. All that being said, Atlus is unlikely to come out of this on top.

“Whatever people may wish, there’s no way to stop any playable game from being executed on the emulator,” the RPCS3 team note.

“Blacklisting the game? RPCS3 is open-source, any attempt would easily be reversed. Attempting to take down the project? At the time of this post, this and many other games were already playable to their full extent, and again, RPCS3 is and will always be an open-source project.”

The bottom line here is that Atlus’ actions may have left a bit of a bad taste in the mouths of some gamers, but even the most hardcore emulator fan shouldn’t be surprised the company went for the throat on a game so fresh. That being said, there are lessons to be learned.

Atlus could’ve spoken quietly to RPCS3 first, but chose not to. RPCS3, on the other hand, will probably be a little bit more strategic with future game compatibility announcements, given what’s just happened. In the long term, that will help them, since it will ensure longevity for the project.

RPCS3 is needed, there’s no doubt about that, but its true value will only be felt when the PS3 has been consigned to history. At that point people will understand why it was worth all the effort – and the occasional hiccup.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Earlier this year, American satellite and broadcast provider Dish Network targeted two well-known players in the third-party Kodi add-on ecosystem.

In a complaint filed in a federal court in Texas, add-on ZemTV and the TVAddons library were accused of copyright infringement. As a result, both are facing up to $150,000 for each offense.

Initially, the true identities of the defendants unknown and listed as John Does, but an amended complaint that was submitted yesterday reveal their alleged names and hometowns.

The Texas court previously granted subpoenas which allowed Dish to request information from the defendants’ accounts on services including Amazon, Github, Google, Twitter, Facebook and PayPal, which likely helped with the identification.

According to Dish ZemTV was developed by Shahjahan Durrani, who’s based in London, UK. He allegedly controlled and maintained the addon which was used to stream infringing broadcasts of Dish content.

“Durrani developed the ZemTV add-on and managed and operated the ZemTV service. Durrani used the aliases ‘Shani’ and ‘Shani_08′ to communicate with users of the ZemTV service,” the complaint reads.

The owner and operator of TVAddons is listed as Adam Lackman, who resides in Montreal, Canada. This doesn’t really come as a surprise, since Lackman is publicly listed as TVAddons’ owner on Linkedin and was previously named in a Canadian lawsuit.

While both defendants are named, the allegations against them haven’t changed substantially. Both face copyright infringement charges and potentially risk millions of dollars in damages.

Durrani directly infringed Dish’s copyrights by making the streams available, the plaintiffs note. Lackman subsequently profited from this and failed to take any action in response.

“Lackman had the legal right and actual ability to supervise and control this infringing activity because Lackman made the ZemTV add-on, which is necessary to access the ZemTV service, available for download on his websites.

“Lackman refused to take any action to stop the infringement of DISH’s exclusive rights in the programs transmitted through the ZemTV service,” the complaint adds.

TorrentFreak spoke to a TVAddons representative who refutes the copyright infringement allegations. The website sees itself as a platform for user-generated content and cites the DMCA’s safe harbor as a defense.

“TV ADDONS is not a piracy site, it’s a platform for developers of open source add-ons for the Kodi media center. As a community platform filled with user-generated content, we have always acted in accordance with the law and swiftly complied whenever we received a DMCA takedown notice.”

The representative states that it will be very difficult for them to defend themselves against a billion dollar company with unlimited resources, but hopes that the site will prevail.

The new TVAddons

After the original TVAddons.ag domain was seized in the Canadian lawsuit the site returned on TVaddons.co. However, hundreds of allegedly infringing add-ons are no longer listed.

The site previously relied on the DMCA to shield it from liability but apparently, that wasn’t enough. As a result, they now check all submitted add-ons carefully.

“Since complying with the law is clearly not enough to prevent frivolous legal action from being taken against you, we have been forced to implement a more drastic code vetting process,” the TVAddons representative says.

If it’s not entirely clear that an add-on is properly licensed, it won’t be submitted for the time being. This hampers innovation, according to TVAddons, and threatens many communities that rely on user-generated content.

“When you visit any given web site, how can you be certain that every piece of media you see is licensed by the website displaying it? You can assume, but it’s very difficult to be certain. That’s why the DMCA is critical to the existence of online communities.”

Now that both defendants have been named the case will move forward. This may eventually lead to an in-depth discovery process where Dish will try to find more proof that both were knowingly engaging in infringing activity.

Durrani and Lackman, on the other hand, will try to prove their innocence.

—

A copy of the amended complaint is available here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Earlier this month The Pirate Bay caused some uproar by adding a Javascript-based cryptocurrency miner to its website.

The miner utilizes CPU power from visitors to generate Monero coins for the site, providing an extra revenue source.

While Pirate Bay only tested the option briefly, it inspired many others to follow suit. Streaming related sites such as Alluc, Vidoza, and Rapidvideo jumped on board, and torrent site Demonoid also ran some tests.

During the weekend, Coinhive’s miner code even appeared on the official website of Showtime. The code was quickly removed and it’s still unclear how it got there, as the company refuses to comment. It’s clear, though, that miners are a hot topic thanks to The Pirate Bay.

The revenue potential is also real. TorrentFreak spoke to Vidoza who say that with 30,000 online users throughout the day (2M unique visitors), they can make between $500 and $600. That’s when the miner is throttled at 50%. Although ads can bring in more, it’s not insignificant.

That said, all the uproar about cryptocurrency miners and their possible abuse has also attracted the attention of ad-blockers. Some people have coded new browser add-ons to block miners specifically and the popular uBlock Origin added Coinhive to its default blocklist as well. And that’s just after a few days.

Needless to say, this limits the number of miners, and thus the money that comes in. And there’s another problem with a similar effect.

In addition to ad-blockers, anti-virus tools are also flagging Coinhive. Malwarebytes is one of the companies that lists it as a malicious activity, warning users about the threat.

The anti-virus angle is one of the issues that worries Demonoid’s operator. The site is used to ad-blockers, but getting flagged by anti-virus companies is of a different order.

“The problem I see there and the reason we will likely discontinue [use of the miner] is that some anti-virus programs block it, and that might get the site on their blacklists,” Deimos informs TorrentFreak.

Demonoid’s miner announcement

Vidoza operator Eugene sees all the blocking as an unwelcome development and hopes that Coinhive will tackle it. Coinhive may want to come out in public and start to discuss the issue with ad-blockers and anti-virus companies, he says.

“They should find out under what conditions all these guys will stop blocking the script,” he notes.

The other option would be to circumvent the blocking through proxies and circumvention tools, but that might not be the best choice in the long run.

Coinhive, meanwhile, has chimed in as well. The company says that it wasn’t properly prepared for the massive attention and understands why some ad-blockers have put them on the blacklist.

“Providing a real alternative to ads and users who block them turned out to be a much harder problem. Coinhive, too, is now blocked by many ad-block browser extensions, which – we have to admit – is reasonable at this point.”

Most complaints have been targeted at sites that implemented the miner without the user’s consent. Coinhive doesn’t like this either and will take steps to prevent it in future.

“We’re a bit saddened to see that some of our customers integrate Coinhive into their pages without disclosing to their users what’s going on, let alone asking for their permission,” the Coinhive team notes.

The crypto miner provider is working on a new implementation that requires explicit consent from website visitors in order to run. This should deal with most of the negative responses.

If users start mining voluntarily, then ad-blockers and anti-virus companies should no longer have a reason to block the script. Nor will it be easy for malware peddlers to abuse it.

To be continued.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.